I’m blogging over here now. It’s the end of the road for this blog.

I’ll leave the content up indefinitely, there are some pages still getting traffic.

Lady,

The honour of a devoted heart now beating with hope now trembling with anxiety is offered to you – is yours. Reject it; scorn it, it is yours – I do not write to tell you that I can love you that I wish to love you that I ask the privilege to love you, I write simply to tell you that I do love you and that which a passion so ardent a feeling so profound that in spite of all the obstacles which interpose, I have been compelled to venture this declaration.

To say that you are beautiful, graceful, accomplished – that you are fair and lovely – that you are admirable in all that makes women admired is but to echo the words or embody the thoughts of all around you – All acknowledge your attractions but I feel them and I cannot be so false to my own heart as to conceal the emotions from the object to which they tend.

Lady my position is humble but not so are my aspirations and my hopes for I have dared to love you – I have not the gift of fortune yet I am seeking what the wealth of the universe could purchase from me – Your love let it be still as it has been the bright star of my destiny. Let it be the goal of my ambition and you shall see how bravely I will endeavor to deserve what I will aspire to the favour that can give unbounded happiness to.

Your devoted admirer

James Johnston

They were married eight months later.

James hand wrote this himself, in startlingly good penmanship. The letter is frequently on display at [Upper Canada Village](http://www.uppercanadavillage.com/home.htm) — ‘Upper Canada’ is an old name for the province of Ontario Canada.

They were my great-great-great-grandparents (maybe another great in there). I have no real information beyond that, other than, I suppose, they had at least one child :-)

So. Did you know that a severe impact on browser rendering time can be caused by CSS and javascript not playing nicely together? Rendering on different browsers varies by a factor of about 20 times (or whatever factor you want). I sure didn’t know.

And I have a “solution.”

So what is the situation? Consider an actual page from a webapp I’m developing. In FireFox the page loads and renders in something around 0.6 seconds. Safari loads and renders the same page in 12 seconds. This is not a contrived example.

What’s involved on the page? It displays summary information about all of the users of the webapp. The test data has 119 users. It uses [Blueprint](http://www.blueprintcss.org/) and the jQuery plugin [ListNav](http://www.ihwy.com/labs/jquery-listnav-plugin.aspx). I recommend them both, very nice. [ListNav](http://www.ihwy.com/labs/jquery-listnav-plugin.aspx) (check out the [demo pages](http://www.ihwy.com/labs/Demos/Current/jquery-listnav-plugin.aspx)) allows for easy navigation through a long list. [Blueprint](http://www.blueprintcss.org/) is a CSS framework for laying out a page using a grid (check it out, it has [demos](http://www.blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/sample.html) too), handles typography, and generally helps you make a page look decent. Blueprint works with <div>s, and ListNav wraps them up in <ul>s. Each user is represented by five <div>s within a <ul>.

On Safari, by changing the number of <div>s for each user I get:

To cut it short, if I remove the link tag to the Blueprint screen.css file in the header, the page renders almost instantly, even with 8 divs — but it looks like crap. There are a lot of things that are not the problem (I was “busy”, let’s say), and I don’t really want to go into it.

A few moments of thinking… what if I delay the application of the BlueprintCSS file? A little googling and I found some code in a JavaScript Kit tutorial: [Dynamically loading an external JavaScript or CSS file](http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/loadjavascriptcss.shtml), which I simplified to:

function loadcssfile(filename){
  // thanks to http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/loadjavascriptcss.shtml
  var fileref=document.createElement("link");
  fileref.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
  fileref.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
  fileref.setAttribute("href", filename);
  document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(fileref);
}

$(document).ready(function() { var navOpts = { initLetter: 'a' };
                               $('#user-list').listnav(navOpts);

                               loadcssfile("blueprint/screen.css") // use a real URL here
                             });

This is (obviously) in the jQuery document ready function.

And it worked! In Safari. Not so well in FireFox. Sigh. In FireFox, this caused a rendering effect: the unstyled content would flash on the screen before being being styled. So, back to the webapp, and check the user agent, and only do this trick for Safari. Well, hold on. It is actually any AppleWebKit based user agent — OmniWeb screws up too. There’s probably others. Anyway, about 0.3s in Safari, obviously no change in FireFox, and I’m happy enough for now.

It all came down to a single link element in the page’s header.

How do you find banking services? Google, right? Maybe not.

Back in September my company did a bit of research into just how one might find banking services using web-based searches in Canada. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue, but it is. And it doesn’t matter if you are looking for online services or branch services. We’ve summarised the problem and its impact in a press release:
60 Million Qualified Leads Untapped by Top Canadian Banks — Leading Canadian banks are missing a $300 million opportunity.

Alex Sirota, of NewPath Consulting had a look, and well, see for yourself what he thinks.

If you want, you can poke about Recursive’s website to see how we’d approach dealing with that problem and several kinds of (surprisingly) similar problems.

So.

Roy Fielding, Mr. REST himself, writes a nice article about REST APIs and how they must be hypertext driven. I thought this was a pretty good article, and that I’d use it in the future when trying to explain REST APIs.

Apparently, not everyone agrees. It sounds as though Roy had a little bit of grief which is outlined nicely in this followup article.

Understandably, Roy isn’t pleased.

As you may have noted, my last post seems to have hit a nerve in various communities, particularly with those who are convinced that REST means HTTP (because, well, that’s what they think it means) and that any attempt by me to describe REST with precision is just another elitist philosophical effort that won’t apply to those practical web developers who are just trying to get their javascript to work on more than one browser.

Apparently, I use words with too many syllables when comparing design trade-offs for network-based applications. I use too many general concepts, like hypertext, to describe REST instead of sticking to a concrete example, like HTML. I am supposed to tell them what they need to do, not how to think of the problem space. A few people even complained that my dissertation is too hard to read. Imagine that!

Oh dear.

In the very first comment Dorian Taylor says:

With all due respect, I think you’re continually going to encounter that contingent that is expecting the bullet list of instructions, or even lazier, the screencast of ultra-practical steps to make the baubles twirl on their displays. My only consolation is the notion that this is probably just a symptom of the industrial age’s death rattle, and it’s anomalous that this behaviour is even considered acceptable.

Well, I don’t know how “ultra-practical” this video is, but it *is* from Joe Gregorio. Nice to see what Joe looks like. Oh, and it’s quite informative too, of course.

UPDATE: REST is UnAmerican, David Ing I think.

It’s long been our belief that REST and Roy Fielding has been palling around with Hypermedia. He barely denies it. But, my friends, let me tell you that no washed up PhD dissertation will dictate our request/response. He says it, in his own words – he talks about ‘constraints’, he toys with the idea of a transfer of ’state’. My friends, in these times of economic crisis we need less State involvement, not more. REST doesn’t understand. Let’s give state transition back to the hard working people of the USA. Enough with this hypermedia socialism.

Using this plugin, your MSIE users will see your website with a grayscale color
This plugin helps people moving away from Internet Explorer: it turns
the colors of your website to a grayscaled version.

You can get it here

UPDATE: This was an attempt at humour, even though this plugin is so tempting it hurts… Nah! I’m resolved! I’m going to use it somewhere!

Imagine this kind of crap provoking me into finally posting something new here.

I like the original URL better: www.FuckYouRogers.com

Here’s a video that puts forward an argument that is difficult to wriggle out of.

The form of the argument is fairly obvious to me, and I doubt that I’m unique, but I also know that a lot of people are totally unaware of the technique or the concepts behind it — you’d think this would be public school stuff. Try this variation:

So. What are you going to do?

This is the third Toronto Lisp Meetup (of the modern era). I am really going to have to make it out to this one. I missed the last two for various annoying reasons.

ALU Wiki: toronto: Toronto Lisp Meetup – 3 April 2008, after 6pm

Bloor St. Fox and Fiddle

Toronto Lisp Mailing List

All Common Lisp, Scheme and Smalltalk programmers are welcome! Haskell, Ruby, Python and even Java programmers are welcome too!

Look for the table with the Lisp flyer on it.

Located at 280 Bloor St, the Fox and Fiddle has free wireless Internet and, $3 cocktails and bar rails on Thursdays and Fridays.

There’s a [facebook](http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9038472973) event, if you’re into that kind of thing.

There’s going to be another attempt at a lisp user meetup in Toronto:

The Announcement

This has been tried at least once already, but it fizzled out.

The meetup is open to anybody interested in lisp, not just people using lisp. So if you’re curious…

Unfortunately for me, I won’t be able to make it this time (I’m supposed to be in Waterloo that evening, so at least now there’s an upside should there be a winter storm :-)

In A Little Head Trauma…: Returning None is Evil, Mark Derricutt provoked a brief moment of Smalltalk envy.

(self doSomethingThatMightReturnNil)
  ifNotNil: [val | val doSomethingWithNoHassle].

In addition to what Mark was actually responding to, it is an annoyance that I’ve had repeatedly in Ruby but never really considered fixing. Until now.

The annoying code:

tmp = doSomethingThatMightReturnNil
tmp.doSomethingWithNoHassle if tmp

Just look at those tmp variables.

This is the ‘cure’:

class Object
  def if_not_nil(&blk)
    yield(self) if blk
  end
end

class NilClass
  def if_not_nil(&blk)
  end
end

I like monkey patching.

And now I can write:

doSomethingThatMightReturnNil.if_not_nil { | v | v.doSomethingWithNoHassle }

Which is so much nicer [UPDATE: and nicer still after Sean prompted me to actually get Mark's example right].

That really does look like Smalltalk, doesn’t it?

In csh:

hutch% got a light?
csh: got: No match.

A long time ago it used to say “Sorry. No Match.” — things are a little ruder these days.

Sorry about that. Some kind of flashback I think.

Why do people think content management is not possible for static websites?

And another related mystery:

Why do people think dynamic site generation is superior to a static website even when the site does not allow for any kind of reader contribution?

And, I suppose if you know me, there’s a third mystery:

So… why on earth do you care Hutchison? Eh?

Well, maybe I’ll start with the last mystery. I do happen to care. For a couple of reasons.

First, it turns out that I’m biased. I’ve been working on a program called Raconteur for the last few years. Until recently I’ve been in denial, unable to admit that it is, in fact, a content management system — well, I’d admit it was like a CMS but would deny it was a CMS. This lead to painful and prematurely technical discussions of what it does, usually by explaining what it doesn’t do. Ever try to describe something by describing what it isn’t? Sigh.

So last week I think, I tried out the phrase “CMS for static websites”. Good grief! Saying that totally eliminated the need for any of that painful and frustrating conversation. What it did do was introduce a couple of questions, but they don’t come up until much later and when do they aren’t asked very hard (so to speak) — the person I’m talking to already knows the answer they just can’t quite believe it.

You know, sometimes I’m appalled how I miss the obvious. The only defence I’ll offer is that there are well over 100 people using Raconteur and not one of them saw this either.

Those questions that get asked later, after a little reflection and googling, lead to the first two mysteries.

The second reason I care about this is because of the unintended disservice done to the clients of those web professionals who hold the views with mysterious origin. I understand holding those views since they contributed to my denial that Raconteur is a CMS. But they are wrong!

A Fact: Raconteur provides a very comprehensive capability for building and maintaining a large static website that anyone would acknowledge is just like a CMS.

A Fact: Raconteur is not the only software that does this, though the club is very very small compared to the total number of CMSs out there. There are thousands upon thousands of commercial and open source CMSs, and some huge but unknown number of ‘home-built’ CMSs. I know of less than six that do what Raconteur does — I expect that there must be more, but I can’t find them, probably because they are overwhelmed by the other CMSs. [UPDATE: I had intended to link to one of our most interesting competitors: Big Medium]

A Fact: contrary to popular belief, static websites don’t get unmanageable at 20-50 pages. Raconteur’s very first live site was around 4000 pages, every last one of them static. Updates to the website can be made in minutes (if you are daring or foolish, you can do it in well less than a minute).

A Fact: static websites are the easiest, cheapest, and fastest way to deploy a website. How often do you get those three things at the same time?

A Fact: — well, this is really an opinion but I’m saying it’s a fact — most ‘dynamic’ websites out there would benefit by being static, and the rest may well benefit by separating the read-write part from the read-only part.

A Recommendation: think very hard about what ‘dynamic’ and ’static’ mean, be especially alert to logical conclusions being drawn by inadvertently using synonyms of those two words (this is where I think the second mystery originates).

I’ll go into a few more aspects of this later.

This is going to sound like an advertisement, well maybe it is kind of: Raconteur is in production, though currently most people come to it by word-of-mouth, and every one of them knows that they are ‘early adopters’ and what that means. It isn’t really in ’stealth’ mode, more like a silent presence. The documentation is, at best, sparse. Even so there are more than 100 websites using it. If you want to know more we’d be more than happy to talk to you. We expect to have the documentation completed sometime in August, at which point we’ll be opening Raconteur to a wider audience.

So I was reading this article Making Rails go Vroom by Charlie Savage and thought maybe I’d profile a few of the more frequent actions in Raconteur, which is written in Rails.

The instructions provided in other posts by Carlie are perfectly clear and easy to follow but, inevitably, they don’t work for versions of Rails that don’t implement the alias_method_chain method.

This is the definition of that method:

class Module
  def alias_method_chain(target, feature)
    aliased_target, punctuation = target.to_s.sub(/([?!=])$/, ''), $1
    yield(aliased_target, punctuation) if block_given?

    with_method, without_method = "#{aliased_target}_with_#{feature}#{punctuation}", "#

    alias_method without_method, target
    alias_method target, with_method

    case
       when public_method_defined?(without_method)
         public target
       when protected_method_defined?(without_method)
         protected target
       when private_method_defined?(without_method)
         private target
     end
  end
end

You can stick it anywhere that gets loaded early enough by Rails. I put it into the profiling.rb file that comes with the ruby_perf Rails plugin.

It turns out that there was a call to a method that was not strictly necessary, but it had the possibility of touching the database. So I removed that call, and got a fairly significant speed up. Which I thought was interesting. So I poked about some more and discovered that the culprit was the XML escape routine (the one that replaces “<" with "<" and so on). This was really quite bad. I managed in this specific case to avoid the problem, but sometimes it must be run. I think I'm going to have to find a faster implementation of that, maybe even written in C.

So, I got an email message this morning from CIO magazine. They wanted to do a kind of survey while renewing my subscription. They embedded a form in the email message, that I was able to do form-editing-things to. When done, press submit, and my email handler (mail.app on OS X) asked my browser to handle it and it fired the form off.

The form uses GET as its method rather than POST. This might be important?

I *did not know* you could do this, and I never really thought of it before. I don’t normally like HTML in email, but maybe I’ll reconsider.

My company has a webapp, Raconteur, that needs to get people to do things asynchronously. Sending a form in an email message might be a really handy trick. I suppose that not all browsers can do this, so I’ll need a link of some sort as well, but still…

Then this is what you need to do (if you haven’t already figured this out).

I am using Rails 1.0.0 for an application at my company, and for annoying reasons, I can’t at the moment switch to Rails 1.2.3. This requires activesupport 1.2.5 to be installed. Since there are a lot of things using activesupport other than Rails I’ve also got version 1.4.0 installed.

If you install the haml gem and try to do something like this in a ruby script:

require 'haml'

engine = Haml::Engine.new("%p hello world!")
puts engine.render

you’ll get some ugly looking exception complaining about activesupport 1.4.0 and 1.2.5.

Worse, just by having installed the haml gem other things will break. For example, Merb won’t start because of that same exception.

Luckily, this bit of code works:

begin
  require 'haml'
rescue
  require 'haml'
end

engine = Haml::Engine.new("%p hello world!")
puts engine.render

and merb will start again if you replace the require 'haml/engine' in the lib/merb/template/haml.rb in the merb gem with:

begin
  require 'haml/engine'
rescue
  require 'haml/engine'
end

Well then, fix it once and for all.

  sudo mkdir /System/Library/CoreServices/JUNK
  sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Front\ Row.app /System/Library/CoreServices/JUNK

or, if you are really in a state:

sudo rm /System/Library/CoreServices/Front\ Row.app

Then kill the already running Font Row.app process.

Gone! For good!

What a relief!

Why you ask? Well, for some reason Front Row keeps getting control of my machine. I don’t know why. But it is very distracting when it happens in the middle of something… wait for the fancy animation, wait for a couple seconds, hit escape or command-esc a couple of times (and if that doesn’t work, put the machine to sleep and wake it up, then try the escape, repeat as needed).

Akismet has caught just short of 300 spam comments. Only two spam comments managed to get past it in the last 18 hours. Pretty impressive!

I thought I had screwed up the permalinks. Well, it seems that all I did is improve the default permalinks. The ugly old way still works. That’s pretty good.

Now, the real question is, do the RSS feeds still work.

Update: Akismet has caught 11,782 spam comments and trackbacks in 20 days. That’s 11,782 that I didn’t need to deal with. This is very good.

Hmmm. I’ve been using WordPress for this blog, versions 1.2.1 actually. That’s pretty old, considering both years and that a new 2.2 version of WordPress has just been released.

So I’m upgrading. Version 1.2.1 to version 1.5.something. Then to version 2.2 I guess. You can’t go from 1.2.1 to 2.2 directly, you have to go through 1.5.x (where I am now)

It turns out that I also have to upgrade PHP and MySQL.

And I lost the theme. I was getting tired of it anyway.

So why am I doing this? Well, I’ve got to do something about that spam.

Sigh.

UPDATE: I now have PHP and MySQL updated to pretty current versions, thanks to the help of my ISP BareMetal (with a special thanks to James). If you are looking for a good ISP check these guys out.

UPDATE2: I am now running the most recent version of WordPress. Unfortunately I’ve screwed up the permalinks. What a mess! I have a very basic theme that I like, I’ll sooner or later fix it up more to my taste. And about that spam… I had just shy of 15,000 spam comments in my comment ‘moderation’ queue. I’m hoping akismet is as good as it seems (though by messing up the permalinks I’ve temporarily foiled the spam bots :-)

UPDATE3: That’s all for now, I’ll tweak the theme forever.

It appears that somebody is sending out email using my email address as the from address.

I really don’t appreciate this. And there is no way to stop it.

So, if you get spam seemingly from someone at recursive.ca it isn’t from us.

To make matters worse, all the bounced spam is coming to my inbox.